It’s Pavlovian. Springtime arrives and my mind is on a plane to Jupiter, Florida. That’s where I spent many spring training sessions helping the St. Louis Cardinals get into peak mental shape for the upcoming baseball season.
That’s right. It’s not just about swinging a bat and figuring out how not to blow out your throwing arm. It’s about mental toughness. And those mental pointers are as useful in the workplace as they are in the field.
The Cardinals hired me in 2006 — I was their first Director of Mental Training — to do these mental calisthenics with the team. The organization already had a coach to teach the mechanics of pitching, batting, and fielding. What the players needed was to learn how to set goals, focus on their priorities, stay positive, be disciplined and win. The year I came on board, the Cards won their first World Series in 20 years.
But my strategies go way beyond baseball. I’ve also trained scores of entrepreneurs and executives. It’s not as apples-and-oranges as you’d think. Business professionals are prone to many of the same detrimental behaviors and mindsets as under-performing athletes. These shortcomings prevent people in both arenas from being at the top of their game and outshining the competition.
You may not be a St. Louis Cardinal but you might need a bit of a boost in your own metaphoric stadium or dugout. Here’s what baseball can teach you about business performance.
1. Forget the home run: pay attention to your swing. Focusing only on the target — finishing the report, making the sale, acquiring the new client — is almost a guarantee you won’t reach your destination. That’s because you can’t accomplish a goal without first having a sound process in place.
The better strategy is to identify the daily goals that will have the greatest influence on your performance. These “process goals” are the ones ultimately tied to your success. Once you’ve chosen them, put all your energy and courage into tackling them every single day. If your aim is to double your client load in a year, then figure out three process goals you need to complete daily that will help you reach that ultimate target. If you’re relentless and consistent about doing them, chances are high you’ll succeed.
2. Don’t take your eye off the ball. Many high-performing businesspeople believe they can multitask and still maintain focus. For instance, they answer emails and check their e-calendar while talking to a client. However, recent research conducted by Stanford University found that multitaskers are less productive than their single-minded counterparts, and that they also suffer from weaker self-control. The American Psychological Association also cites a study showing that multitasking leads to as much as a 40 percent drop in productivity.
The bad news is multitasking can be addictive. Control your tendency to become distracted by keeping your eye on the task you are involved with in the moment. That means turning off your cell phone and shutting down your email when you complete your three designated process tasks.
3. Be your own referee. If you want to be more productive, you must establish your own limits. Your “not to-do” list might include counterproductive tasks such as responding to company emails during family time, talking to clients after a set time you’ve designated, or saying yes to a new project without evaluating it properly. You need to schedule your calendar, rather than let your calendar schedule you.
4. Get R&R between workouts. Nearly four out of 10 workers are regularly fatigued, according to a recent study in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine . In fact, the rate of lost productivity for fatigued workers – often caused by lack of sleep – was 66 percent, compared with 26 percent for workers without fatigue. That translates into a total average of 5.6 hours per week of lost productive time for fatigued workers, compared with 3.3 hours for their counterparts without fatigue. Make rest and rejuvenation a priority. Give yourself between seven and nine hours of sleep per night.
5. Listen to your body. When athletes try to push through the pain they often end up injured, which secures them a place on the dreaded Disabled List. In the workplace, this behavior is known as “extreme working,” which results in lower performance.
New research has found that 69 percent of extreme workers — those super-high achievers who regularly work between 60-80 hours a week and are ranked in the top six percent of earners – admit that their extreme working habits undermine their health. Not surprisingly, this level of performance is unsustainable. The resulting burn out happens both in baseball — check out those promising athletes benched for the season or faced with early retirement — and in office cubicles.
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Jason Selk, PhD, trains companies and organizations — including the world’s finest athletes, coaches, and business leaders — on how to achieve optimal performance. He’s the bestselling author of 10-Minute Toughness (McGraw-Hill, 2008) and Executive Toughness (McGraw-Hill, 2011). He’s a regular television and radio contributor to ABC, CBS, ESPN, and NBC. Learn more at www.enhancedperformanceinc.com
-what was your biggest lesson learned from the above article?